Royal Kerckhaert – Largest Horseshoe Factory in the world

Background
Royal Kerckhaert is the world’s largest independent manufacturer of horseshoes. To achieve its premier position the company has always upheld its core values: total commitment to dealers, and uncompromising product innovation and quality since it was first founded in The Netherlands in 1906. Royal Kerckhaert is a producer with its own factories but also has a very well maintained sales network around the world.

Challenge
To create the best website in the horseshoe industry, focusing on design, performance, and functionality.

Why Sitefinity
Reliability, based on standard Microsoft.NET concepts, consistency, good back-office. Sitefinity is a great product for this kind of application.

Challenges and Objectives

Before we tried Sitefinity for this project, we experienced a lot of problems. Some of the goals we needed to achieve could not be realized with a simple CMS system, written in PHP. We started to study different CMS options. Because of our experience in the development of Microsoft .NET applications, we decide to look further into Sitefinity. The fact that Sitefinity is a commercial CMS did not affect our decision at all. At Infodatek we recognize the high level of consistency and technical support, which Telerik provides.

We experienced a few little problems during the learning curve with Sitefinity. However, it didn’t take long for us to get used to the system. There were some tricky parts with the Kerckhaert project, because they wanted to maintain a lot of the contents of the website by themselves. That included their product catalogue, which included farrier tools and horseshoes. To achieve this, we built a few custom controls, which allow the client to manage everything through the Sitefinity back-office.

The Solution

Kerckhaert needed multi-language functionality, which included the following localizations: English, Dutch, French, Swedish, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. We heavily utilized the sitemap, as well as the Generic content module. Initially we used the list module to display products on the website, but we eventually replaced it with our own custom product catalogue control.

The following standard modules were used:

-News (for News and the Hall Of Fame);

-RSS for both channels;

-Events;

-Newsletter (with custom made Newsletter subscription form);

-Keywords-based search index

Custom modules created:

-Product catalogue (categories and products);

-Horseshoes – specialty product item module;

-Custom Contact form;

-Client registration form for online store;

-Lost password form for online store;

-Custom Newsletter subscription form;

The Results

The Kerckhaert project was our first Sitefinity implementation. The results for the first phase were very good. The next phase of the project is to improve SEO results and attract more visitors through online marketing campaigns.

Our first impression with Sitefinity was very positive. It offers high level of productivity, because of its ease of use. Because of our .NET experience we were very happy that we were able to utilize the same principles in Sitefinity as in any other .NET project – Master Pages, Custom Controls, etc.

Our client’s content editors are also very satisfied with Sitefinity’s ease of use and intuitiveness.

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